Benchmarks - 4K

4K gaming tests

With 4K gaming (8.3 Megapixels) being hot right now due to affordable screens, and older 1080 triple surround setups requiring 6.2 Megapixels or 11 Megapixels for 1440p triple surround, we dive right into to 4K Ultra performance. Where possible we used MSAA 4x in game settings.

A speed-up is available by selecting Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing (MFAA) via driver override switch or GeForce Experience for those who want it, selecting MSAA 2x in-game and MFAA on will give an equivalent result to MSAA 4X with better performance. Since this is an optional feature, we left out optional, vendor-specific AA modes from this overall performance review and standardise on MSAA/SSAA.

What we see here is that despite our large 12 GB frame buffer, Super-sampling AA is still a massive hit on performance, known troublesome games such as the original editions of Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light still chug along.

A couple of points to consider when looking at our 4K gaming results. Lightly threaded games would benefit from a higher clockspeed CPU such as Intel i7-4790K or a heavily overclocked quad core i7

Simply slightly tweaking the uncore clock speed (the BUS clockspeed on modern CPU), by 0.5 to 1.5 MHz results in an increase of several frames per second in, up to 5 in TOTAL WAR: Shogun 2's CPU benchmark due to the resulting higher overall CPU speed, up to an extra 50 MHz.

Secondly, software is still the limitation, a programmable GPU can only operate as well as its API and middleware, plus the end user application or game. Different game engines behave differently. We wont know the true performance of the TITAN X HARDWARE until we perform further testing with DirectX 12 or VULKAN which are claimed to offer not only significantly better efficiency but better performance.

On a day to day basis, adjustment of game settings, perhaps no AA at 4K should yield a great 4K gaming experience on TITAN X

Sleeping Dogs performance at 4K with varying levels of Anti-Aliasing

The original release of Sleeping Dogs from United Front Games and Square-Enix was branded under AMD's Gaming Evolved marketing program and as such included some graphical features to maximise visual quality.

Optional within the game are HD textures which were later pushed into the remastered version of the game and anti-aliasing levels of normal high and extreme, which combine FXAA and Super-Sampled Anti Aliasing

Sleeping Dogs Anti-Aliasing modes:

Normal: FXAA Only. Approx 1.6GB Video Memory used with all options maxed out

Extreme FXAA High SSAA High. Approx 3.3GB Video Memory used with all options maxed out

The game offers these AA presets only, you canno't individually toggle FXAA or SSAA.

At normal setting, Reference GTX 980 to the over-clocked ROG GTX 980 nets us a 10% gain. ROG GTX 980 to TITAN X nets us another 17% gain, and reference GTX 980 to TITAN X 30% which is what was expected for the TITAN.

On average framerates, we see the same scaling across the different modes and cards.

When testing with extreme AA, TITAN X would hit its power and temp limits, turning GPU boost off